Imgur Goes Oprah With GIFs. Everyone Gets a GIF

No longer will you be last to the GIF party if you use Imgur’s GIF creation tool. Designed to convert any video into an animated GIF, you will be on par with your peers on Reddit and other forums such as NeoGAF.

The tool from Imgur is user friendly. See a ridiculously stupid YouTube video that deserves a GIF? Paste the URL in the tool and animate the section you want. The system converts it in the background and you’re free to post wherever.

Imgur’s system renders GIFV, which is slightly different from the old school GIF. They loop like regular GIFs, but are more similar to video files. Some benefits are they are smoother and are smaller file sizes.

I think we can all get onboard with better file sizes. Nothing drives you crazier than stumbling on a forum page where someone went insane with post GIFs. Talk about piss your browser off.

YouTube is also trialing a GIF creation tool, so it’s nice to see tech companies improve on the old format. There are some caveats. Embedding a GIFV does require a bit of HTML tweaking. Browsers have not quite caught up with the new technology.

There’s not an option to select which format the tool with render. Sometimes you just want to spit out the your favorite meme in a GIF format. Who cares if the file size is massive, ugly and beyond cumbersome. Once you embed it, it ceases to be your problem.